National Center for Supercomputing Applications Selects LSI CacheCade SSD

LSI
Corporation announced that the National Center for
Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) has deployed a system utilizing LSI 6Gb/s
SAS RAID controllers with LSI CacheCade cache tiering software to explore data storage challenges that will come with the Dark
Energy Survey.

The Dark Energy Survey is a multinational effort to
study the acceleration of the expanding universe. Involving more than 120
scientists from 23 institutions, it will be one of the most data-intensive
astronomical research projects.

LSI reseller partner International Computer Concepts built
the system for NCSA around the LSI MegaRAID SAS 9260-8i low-profile MD2
eight-port controller and LSI CacheCade software for I/O performance
acceleration. The system is designed to deliver the performance, throughput and
scalability required to store and process approximately 200TB of raw image data
in a database that is expected to grow by 400GB daily over the one and a half
year life of the project.

"When you consider that the Dark Energy Survey will
examine more than 300 million galaxies and a 5,000 square degree surface area,
it’s no surprise that this will be one of the most rigorous data projects ever
undertaken by NCSA," said Bernie Acs, informatics system designer and
database architect at NCSA. "We may never know the exact size of the
universe or why it appears to be expanding at an increasing rate, but thanks in
part to the 9260-8i card and the CacheCade software from LSI, we have the tools
to get us closer to the answer very soon."

LSI CacheCade software enables SSDs to
act as a secondary tier of controller cache in front of hard
drives, accelerating application and workload performance. The technology has
helped to accelerate the performance of NCSA’s HDD arrays by
enabling three 160GB SSDs to be configured as an additional high-performance
read cache resource available to the controller. The solution has enabled NCSA
to reduce the time required to create database indices from four and six hours
to only 15 minutes, an approximately 20x performance improvement. NCSA expects
the performance benefits to grow linearly from adding up to three more 9260-8i
cards with CacheCade software per system.

"The idea that there are areas of physics still yet to
be discovered is quite extraordinary, and LSI is proud that our storage
technologies are playing a key role in research of such galactic
importance," said Brent Blanchard, director, worldwide channel sales and
marketing, LSI. "From climate modeling to genome sequencing, LSI storage
technologies are helping scientific researchers cost-effectively tackle some of
the world’s most diverse and demanding data storage challenges."